Traditional call centres allow agents to deal with queries, complaints or other issues raised by remote users (referred to herein as “customers”, irrespective of whether they are actually buying products or services from the call center organisation) who telephone the call centre. Sophisticated call centre software will often filter calls through a series of interactive voice response (IVR) menus to enable certain queries to be dealt with automatically and other queries to be routed to the most appropriate agent or group of agents using “skillset routing”.
The call centre software also provides reporting functions allowing the management of the call centre to assess the performance and efficiency of individual agents and of groups of agents in terms of the time taken to respond to and deal with particular calls.
Multimedia call centres are emerging, largely as a consequence of the fact that many call centre customers will have a number of communication media at their disposal. For example, a customer who contacts a call centre initially by submitting a web page form when navigating a website may wish to follow up on this query by email and/or by speaking to an agent. (Of course the communications need not be and generally are not, unidirectional; contact can be made initially by the agent, such as in telemarketing call centres, and emails sent by customers will often be responded to by return email from the agent.)
Whereas conventional call centre management software is well adapted to monitor and generate statistics relating to agent performance in voice calls, it can be more difficult to provide useful statistics in multimedia call centres. For example, the management of the call centre may be interested not only in response times, but also in the efficiency of the agent as measured by some metric of success. In a call centre dealing primarily with complaints, the metric may be the customer satisfaction rating when the complaint has been disposed of, as measured by a follow-up survey. In call centres having sales of a product or service as their primary goal, the metric may be the number of sales or the financial value of sales attributable to the agent, in which case the amount of time spent dealing with a customer will be partly evaluated on the sales achieved. In telemarketing operations the success metric may the proporion of contacts who agree to receive a sales representative at their premises.
Tracking time-based statistics and success-based statistics across a number of diverse media imposes additional demands on the call centre management and reporting software. Of particular difficulty is the problem of identifying a number of distinct, time-separated communications made using different media types, as being related to a single case or transaction.
It would therefore be desirable to provide call centre management methods and systems which provide enhanced abilities in this regard.